A recent episode of [David Senra's podcast with Tony Xu](https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/tony-xu), founder of DoorDash has some interesting points on this topic. Essentially there, they restricted the service to one locality, and he and his co-founders were the first drivers. Once demand was proven and slowly scaled, there was an incentive for other drivers to join, and with more drivers it opened up a wider geography.

I suspect this is the best option. Focus on one city pair to start with, _you_ are the courier and find customers on that city pair. Then you can start figuring out how to attract people onto that city pair so you don't have to do it anymore (as there will be demand).

this is exactly the kind of specific example I was looking for. Going to listen to that episode. The "founders were the first drivers" pattern keeps coming up in this thread, that might be the way after all.